watches Unsupported browser: Your browser does not meet modern web standards. See how it scores »

Comments
Email
Service
Service
More Share
Print
A Chip for Longer-Lasting Wearable Computers
Computing News
0 comments
A Chip for Longer-Lasting Wearable Computers
Batteries for smart watches and other wearables never last long – a new design of microchip could change that.
By Tom Simonite on August 27, 2014
Why It Matters

Replica omega Wearable computers could find many uses but are hampered by short battery lives.

swiss replica watches Existing wearable devices such as Google’s head-mounted computer Google Glass require battery charging at least once a day, even with light use. A new kind of low-power chip aimed at such wearable devices could not only extend battery lives but also allow the devices to constantly listen for voice commands.

Replica cartier The new chip, made by startup company Ineda Systems, is intended to work alongside the main processor inside a device, performing functions such as listening for voice commands and running simple apps. That saves energy by allowing the main processor to spend more time powered down.

Replica cartier “We looked at the typical use cases of a wearable device and we designed a chip with those in mind,” says Ajith Dasari, vice president for platforms and customer engineering at Ineda. “About 90 percent of the time a user’s device will be in ambient mode or they will be only using simple apps.”

iwc replica. Ineda is currently testing samples of two chip designs and says it aims to move them into mass production sometime next year. The company was founded in 2010 and is backed by investors including Qualcomm, which dominates the market for chips inside smartphones and tablets, and Samsung.

Ineda’s chips feature either two or three processor cores. One core has relatively little computing power but also consumes very little power and is designed to be always operating. The other one or two cores on an Ineda chip have more power and are only switched on for heavier tasks. If that’s not enough for the job, the chip wakes up the device’s main, power-hungry processor as a last resort.

Ineda’s most complex chip design, known as Advanced, is aimed at high-end smart watches and should enter production next year. The lowliest of its three cores can perform tasks such as monitoring motion sensors to look for gestures, maintaining a Bluetooth connection to another device, and recognizing a key spoken phrase that wakes up a device. The chip’s second core powers up alongside the first for more complex tasks such as playing music, recognizing a handful of voice commands, or running a simple app such as a heart-rate tracker. Once the third core joins in, the chip can perform more complex tasks, such as full speech recognition, that require accessing data over the Internet.

A less powerful design with only two cores, known as the Micro, is also in testing and headed to production. It is intended for less feature-rich watches and wearable devices, and could also be added to a smartphone to make it more power-efficient, says Dasari.

Smartphones may be where Ineda’s chips first appear, because some manufacturers have already experimented with adding helper chips to improve battery life and functionality. The latest iPhone, for example, includes a chip dedicated to processing motion sensor data (see “What Apple’s M7 Motion-Sensing Chip Could Do.” Motorola’s Moto X phone has a similar chip, as well as another that constantly listens for the phrase “OK, Google” (see “The Era of Ubiquitous Listening Dawns”). Ineda’s chips can take on a wider range of tasks, says Dasari. “The Moto X has two different chips, but we can achieve the same with one chip,” he says.

Tulika Mitra, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore, says that Ineda’s approach will help save power. ARM, the company whose designs underpin most mobile device processors, has moved in a similar direction by releasing a line of “big.LITTLE” chips with large and small processor cores, she says. But Ineda has taken that line of thinking further. “Instead of only big and little cores, now you have a range of cores.”

One challenge for Ineda’s chips is that they are built on a competing architecture to ARM known as MIPS, which is mostly used for relatively low-performance chips. The operating systems used by mobile device manufacturers today are built around ARM chips and would need some modification to support a different architecture, says Mitra.

Dasari acknowledges that software integration is an issue for Ineda, but says the company has ideas for how to tackle it. Google, for one, has signaled it is ready to support MIPS-based chips. And Imagination, the company that licenses the MIPS technology, is one of a handful of companies partnering with Google on its wearable computing software, Android Wear.

A movable smart-watch screen makes it easier to read a map or play a game.

Continue
3
Furniture Shopping with Augmented Reality
0
Using Your Ear to Track Your Heart
1
A New Chip Could Add Motion Sensing to Clothing
1
Could “Force Illusions” Help Wearables Catch On?
0
How Much Is Your Privacy Worth?
4
A Headset Meant to Make Augmented Reality Less of a Gimmick
1
A Startup Hopes to Teach Computers to Spot Tumors in Medical Scans
2
Wireless Power for Minuscule Medical Implants
3
A Headset Meant to Make Augmented Reality Less of a Gimmick

A novel optical technique could overlay virtual imagery on the real world through a compact pair of glasses.

Continue
1
2014 Pioneers | Innovators Under 35

The frontiers of science provide ample space to explore innovation. Meet nine of the pioneers.

Continue
Love of Labor

Automation makes things easier, whether it’s on the factory floor or online. Is it also eroding too many of the valuable...

Continue
3
2014 Inventors | Innovators Under 35

These people are inventing the devices and technologies that will redefine how we live and work.

Continue
2014 Humanitarians | Innovators Under 35

By applying technology in novel ways, they are improving lives and expanding opportunities.

Continue
In Praise of Efficient Price Gouging

Uber’s most important innovation is the way it prices its services. But that innovation has not been unreservedly welcomed...

Continue
25
Tom Simonite Editor
View Profile »

Follow @tsimonite

RSS
A Chip for Longer-Lasting Wearable Computers
0
Quoc Le | Innovators Under 35
Shyam Gollakota | Innovators Under 35
The Man Who Really Built Bitcoin
6
Black Hat: More Internet-Scale Bugs Are Likely Lurking
1
Malware Traffic Spikes Preceded Russian and Israeli Conflicts
1
IBM Chip Processes Data Similar to the Way Your Brain Does
16
Black Hat: Google Glass Can Steal Your Passcodes
4
See all from this author
The Latest
Popular
Most Shared
4 hours ago
Low-Power Chip Could Keep Smart Watches Alive Longer
4 hours ago
With Projection Technology, a Couch Gets Countless Covers
1 day ago
Other Interesting arXiv Papers (Week ending August 23, 2014)
1 day ago
Augmented Reality as More than a Gimmick
1 day ago
Is Your Smartphone Privacy Worth $100 a Month?
Technology Insights - Portability vs. Privacy: Striking the Right Balance in the Mobile Era
Free download courtesy of
1 day ago
The Ultimate Challenge For Recommendation Engines
2 days ago
Can Ice Bucket Money Reinvigorate ALS Research?
4 days ago
Cell-Phone Data Could Help Predict Ebola’s Spread
4 days ago
U.S. Warrants for Data Held Overseas Let American Law Enforcement Ignore Foreign Privacy Rules
4 days ago
Seven Stories You Shouldn’t Miss (Week Ending August 23, 2014)
4 days ago
Training Computers to Spot Tumors
4 days ago
The Ongoing Threat of Cold Boot Attacks
5 days ago
Recommended from Around the Web (Week Ending August 23, 2014)
5 days ago
Magnetic Fields That Could Power Tiny Implants
6 days ago
Touching a Laptop Can Break Its Encryption
See full archive
2 days ago
Can Ice Bucket Money Reinvigorate ALS Research?
1 week ago
35 Innovators Under 35 | 2014
1 week ago
Uber’s Most Important Innovation Isn’t A Car Service: It’s the Pricing Algorithm
6 days ago
Touching a Laptop Can Break Its Encryption
1 day ago
Augmented Reality as More than a Gimmick
1 week ago
Insects May Someday Be Your Next Meal’s Last Meal
1 week ago
Manufacturers Adding Robots to the Factory Floor in Record Numbers
1 week ago
Shyam Gollakota, Emily Cole, David He, and Other Top Young Inventors
4 days ago
Training Computers to Spot Tumors
4 days ago
Cell-Phone Data Could Help Predict Ebola’s Spread
5 days ago
Magnetic Fields That Could Power Tiny Implants
1 week ago
Chinese Search Giant Baidu Thinks AI Pioneer Andrew Ng Can Help It Challenge Google and Become a Global Power
4 days ago
The Ongoing Threat of Cold Boot Attacks
1 week ago
Traffic Light Study Reveals Serious Hacking Risk
6 days ago
The Next Battleground In The War Against Quantum Hacking
4 days ago
Seven Stories You Shouldn’t Miss (Week Ending August 23, 2014)
See full archive
2 days ago
Can Ice Bucket Money Reinvigorate ALS Research?
1 day ago
Augmented Reality as More than a Gimmick
6 days ago
The Next Battleground In The War Against Quantum Hacking
6 days ago
Touching a Laptop Can Break Its Encryption
1 week ago
Insects May Someday Be Your Next Meal’s Last Meal
1 week ago
35 Innovators Under 35 | 2014
1 week ago
How People Consume Conspiracy Theories on Facebook
1 week ago
Meet Gavin Andresen, the Most Powerful Person in the World of Bitcoin
1 month ago
Forget the Shortest Route Across a City; New Algorithm Finds the Most Beautiful
2 months ago
GMO Scaremongering Hurts People Everywhere
3 years ago
Astronomers Find First Evidence of Other Universes
1 year ago
Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves
1 year ago
First Teleportation from One Macroscopic Object to Another
1 year ago
Government Lab Reveals It Has Operated Quantum Internet for Over Two Years
3 months ago
How to Win at Rock-Paper-Scissors
4 months ago
How the Internet Is Taking Away America’s Religion
See full archive
Show comments »
Conversation powered by Livefyre